Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and …
I've been active online a lot more in recent months, far moreso than shortly before I graduated from college back in 2003. Somewhen late in 2001 or early in 2002 I began developing symptoms of repeditive stress trauma in both wrists. The most commonly reported symptom is throbbing pain in one or both hands, which I had in spades, followed by a loss of mobility in the digits I use the most. I'm sorry to report that it's started all over again. More specifically, the symptoms began to reappear about a month ago, and within the last few days they've …
I got back from ContactCon last Friday evening. Between the stress of travel and prepping to participate and present at a conference, the fact that ContactCon was standing room only, general lack of sleep, hauling too much equipment around and dehydration, I don't have the strength right now to write up the conference or post any pics. Suffice it to say that I haven't forgotten anyone - your contact info is neatly stacked up next to my keyboard, and I'm going to write back to everyone - but I need to recuperate a little.
As a few offhand comments made in earlier posts (and no small amount of bitching on Twitter) alluded to, Lyssa and I have largely finished the task of relocating to a house in a small-ish neighborhood a stone's throw from downtown Washington, DC. We're not quite in the Sprawl anymore but you can definitely see signs of its encroachment if you walk a few blocks.
We'd lived for nearly six years in our apartment, a two-and-a-half bedroom deal that started to get pretty crowded a few years in (largely due to the fifteen bookcases split between Lyssa and I, but …
Most of my posts lately have been terse, to say the least. When I've had time to sit and write it's been in fits and spurts over a period of hours or days when I've felt up to it. My queue of things to write about has broken two pages, which means that it's time to delete the older stuff and move on. In Internet time, that's a long while, plus there is more important stuff to worry about. It's not ADHD, it's simple practicality. The "when I've felt up to it" means just what you think it does, I …
In the past couple of weeks it's become something of a fad to post about the genre of cyberpunk becoming somewhat passe'. We now live in the twenty-first century, where much of the fiction that my generation grew up reading was ostensibly set. We don't have flying cars or jetpacks. We don't really have food pills, either, but the nutrient and protein shakes that you can buy in the cold case of just about every convenience store these days (or the frankly awful tasting energy drinks that are popular with the younger set) aren't that far off. We do have …
A couple of days ago I finally got around to posting about what's kept me offline and not particularly feeling up to doing anything, in a nutshell being inundated with everything going wrong in the world (as if this is different from any other year; with life comes suck and fail. It happens.) Then, during my daily newscrawl in which I keep an eye on happenings in the world and look for things that might be sneaking up behind me (the work of a sysadmin is never done), I noticed some things popping up with synchronistic regularity. A couple of …
I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of us are glad that the year 2010 of the common era is over, done with, and a candidate for erasure from the Time Vortex if it starts getting uppity again. Sure, it had its ups and downs for all of us - they always do - but last year was a particularly bad one on a large scale. There was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's destroyed a entire ecosystem, perhaps permanantly. Last January was the earthquake that devastated the island of Haiti, resulting in the …
In an attempt to beat the snow predicted for the DC area sometime today, Lyssa and I left Pittsburgh late last night (0007 EST5EDT) and arrived in DC somewhen around 0430 EST5EDT. After unpacking the TARDIS we promptly passed out for the next six hours. It's been trying to snow off and on all day. I'm beginning to wonder if we'll see any of the snow they've been predicting.
We're home. We've been busy and traveling. We visited our respective families in Pennsylvania and exchanged gifts. I now have a kilt and a silly hat.
